It’s a safe assumption that amongst the vast numbers of websites we host, a pretty decent portion are running some sort of store or catalogue system. As such, we get daily tickets from customers asking which ecommerce script we recommend. I hate these tickets, and I hate them with a passion. Oh, I don’t mind giving customers advice, infact I quite like passing on my experiences with scripts I’ve used, skinned, modified. My gripe isn’t with the customer at all, it’s with the position it puts me in.

If a customer asks a similar question about forum/bulletin board scripts or content management system’s the answer is easy and I can happily recommend 2 or 3 examples, along with my personal preference. If you care, I’d recommend vBulletin (if you’re willing to pay) or SMF (if you’re not) for forums and Joomla or Drupal for CMS. The problem however comes when I have to recommend an eCommerce script, because to be honest the only 2 free one’s out there are terrible.

Of course, I’m referring to OSCommerce and ZenCart, I’ve had the misfortune to skin both (fortunately for the most part I’ve managed to avoid having to modify them at all) and both made me want to tear my face off and stick it in a blender. Of the two, ZenCart is the lesser of 2 evils, but only marginally so. I’m not going to do some sort of detailed review of them, but comparing the two, ZenCart’s admin backend is better, but it’s skinning is significantly worse.

Ok, so you ask.. why don’t I recommend a non-free script. Quite simply because unlike their forum counterparts (you can lease vBulletin for around £40pa) they’re ridiculously expensive. Furthermore, none of them seem to offer any sort of demo of the product. Why would I want to recommend a product I have no way of testing for myself?

So, now you know why I hate that question. Because I have to recommend a vastly inferior product and hope our customers expectations are lower than my own.

I suppose we could write our own… just for our customers… and make it free… that’s a good idea we’ll call it 3DPixelStore. I’ll get right on it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Technology Stuff, Web Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.